PC Critic Reviews

Celestial Return is a worthy successor for Disco Elysium, and it'll be of particular interest if you like Cyberpunk 2077 as well. I went into the game only knowing that it had a similar style, and I came out of it having enjoyed the entire experience. While it's not perfect, and I would like more locations to explore in the city or more anatomy for moving around Netherveil, the overall experience of Celestial Return was an interesting ride through a dystopian location. I actually plan on playing through it a few more times to see if I can get other random encounters and if I can pass rolls I failed the first time to find out how that changes my path forward.

Communicating your inspirations in the marketing of your game may cause people to compare your title to the ones you reference. In the case of Celestial Return, it isn’t a matter of copying those who came before, but of wearing the similarities as a badge of honor. While the gameplay and art direction may be inspired by other intellectual properties, Celestial Return takes them and builds on them even further. The way you generate new dice might need some extra balancing, as their use as both a resource for investigations and currency for shops makes you lose them a bit too quickly. But the strong narrative and visual design elevate this game to be its own source of inspiration for future teams to build upon.

Celestial Return is a good cyberpunk adventure that doesn’t make it easy for players to fully enjoy it. Main characters Howard and Rose are very interesting, and the cyberpunk city they live in is filled with interesting encounters. The dice challenge system asks players to weigh each situation to then decide whether investing their limited resources is worth it. Unfortunately, it is too easy to get into situations where progress is impossible and loading a previous save is required. This means manually saving every 15 minutes is a good idea, especially for players who like to take big risks. Celestial Return could use some extra polish to make its great cyberpunk moments easier to get to.

Celestial Return is an enjoyable narrative RPG, where the simple encounter systems work well enough and the cosmic horror feel to its main adversaries displays enough of a point of difference to make its cyberpunk city worth visiting over so many other similar locations. But the familiarity of the main character’s conceit, issues with clunky inventory and verbosity, as well as buggy cohesion, add some acid to the sweet, hard rain slicking the dark streets. It’s for you to decide whether there’re enough viable parts here for you to assemble into a relatively enjoyable whole, or whether the essence cost in time and enjoyment is just too great. Your move, choomba.

Celestial Return is a narrative gambling RPG that blends investigation, cyberpunk, and cosmic horror in a decaying city where every decision can be a matter of survival. Gameplay revolves around dialogue choices, dice checks, and resource management: the same dice are used both to overcome challenges and as currency, creating constant tension. Strong writing, rich world-building, and striking visuals are its greatest strengths, all enhanced by an excellent soundtrack. The balance, however, is less convincing: the scarcity of dice can become frustrating, discouraging exploration and sometimes forcing players to reload older save files.

Celestial Return leaves as bitter a taste as the capitalist dystopia it aims to portray. While the art, music, and story are stunning in their own right, they create an immersion-breaking mishmash that, at times, makes no sense. It feels more like the development team wanted to throw everything they found cool into a single title without considering how it would all work together. Nowhere is this clearer than in the gameplay, which, due to design oversights in the addition of more layers, leads to an extreme number of potential softlocks. In shorter games, it is fine, but in a six-hour story-driven RPG, not so much.